They don’t even bother with the yerras now
Are they wrong? Jim Gavin and Stephen Rochford want everything conducted in a controlled environment, and central to all that is the players in the respective set-ups.
Access is excess. And if the big loser is the man, woman, and child on the street, no one will mind once Sam Maguire is in tow Monday night. There’s no access to training (which I agree with), and a full lid on the media. By the time the Dublin and Mayo players head to Croke Park on Sunday, they’ll barely remember the few words they fed to the press at traditional media nights nearly three weeks ago.
Rightly or wrongly, I can’t blame them for that.
Trying to argue differently on the basis of how things were dealt with on press nights when I started in 2002 is comparing apples and avocados. Managers are under such pressure nowadays that across the four different personalities I played under with Kerry, there’s a clearly discernible line moving towards keeping it all within the group. The tidying up of that whole area of media and PR has been quite marked.
We played in six successive finals from 2004 to 2009 under Jack O’Connor and Pat O’Shea, and in the earlier years, you did your press the Saturday week before the final — eight days out from Croke Park. It was free rein really for reporters in Killarney. A bit of grub, you might sit down in the dugout with a lad you trusted, walk down the field to the far corner together maybe. The media lads could have pretty much anyone they wanted at the time.
A couple of the Kerry lads, like Dara Ó Cinneide, felt they were getting torched a bit every year, so to overcome that problem one year, Jack brought virtually the entire panel into the function room in the Brehon Hotel with the idea of spreading the load so that the same fella wouldn’t be in every paper the week of the final. Can anyone imagine that now?
And yet it’s only a decade ago. It must have been some sight for the press to have around 20 of us marching in for the annual round of ‘sure you’d have to respect what they’ve achieved/are capable of’. They don’t even bother with the yerras now.
When you are young and carefree, like I was in 2002 and 2004, there’s no real concern about what was in the paper. I was flying in training, and an article wasn’t going to mess me up.
I remember getting on the train in Killarney in 2006, Donaghy and myself playing cards, and Eamonn Keogh, the photographer, coming onto the carriage taking pictures of us. That’s only 11 years ago, but if Éamonn chanced it now, he’d be arrested for trespassing.
As you get older, rightly or wrongly, you start to become more guarded — have I really anything to gain by doing this interview? If I don’t play well, will they be throwing the two-page spread at me when I get off the train Monday night? You are warier if things go wrong because getting older brings vulnerability. I was no longer
bullet-proof.
Before the 2004 All-Ireland final, you could buy the Sunday Independent on a Saturday night in Dublin, and afterwards, I heard that the Mayo lads were doing pictures at the top of the airplane steps in Knock heading for Dublin. They got hammered afterwards but how different was that to us being pictured playing cards on the train from Killarney?
The result informs a lot of comment regarding the publicity game before a big game, but the curse of the big pre-match interview is still alive and well in quite a few inter-county dressing rooms.
Paidi Ó Se had a lot of piseogs in relation to dealing with the media, and I sometimes wonder how he’d cope now if he was still with us. Twitter and Instagram are online hand grenades that can explode on your doorstep nowadays and shine an unwelcome light into the dressing room. In an era when every small margin counts, the safe option is to shut it all down after the semi-final.
Have a look around Twitter this week. You see any Dublin or Mayo players on there? The only things I saw doing the rounds was the menu for the Dublin business breakfast and a Deepthroat conspiracy surrounding a picture of some fella videoing from behind the Kerry management in the drawn semi-final. Like the fella up the tree in Killarney, we were left to wonder what he was doing there, who he was doing it for. Or was he doing anything at all?
Of course, the Dublin and Mayo lads will read bits of the stuff, even though everyone says they don’t. I scoured the papers more when I was younger, as much to look for an edge from something the opposition might be saying as anything else. Their manager might say ‘well, we are defensively strong’, and I might detect (or even invent) a little bit of complacency there to exploit.
I’ve seen systems and individuals malfunction on the biggest day because it’s an area they’ve presumed as solid just because it worked before. Nothing is bullet-proof in September at Croke Park. Nothing.
It’s a different sort of proposition in 2017 with all the hoopla and the media, but it still boils down to a game of football on Sunday.
People say finals are different because of the prize, but the fundamentals are still there — cut throat approach, black and white priorities, go out and win your battle and if your team wins a majority of them, you’re hard beaten. Twelve individual wins around the pitch in a final, you won’t lose. Kerry’s 2005 and 2015 disappointments are the ones where too many of us lost our individual battles in finals.
The happiest place I could be on All-Ireland final weekend was meeting in Killarney to get on the train to Dublin. We were safe when we were together. Even Friday evening, there was no going to the shop, no walk downtown in Killarney, because you just couldn’t. My routine from 2002 on was always the same once we reached the semi-finals in August.
Listen to the Irish Examiner All-Ireland Football final preview:
That meant the Premier League was back and my Saturday night was topped off with Match of the Day, once Liverpool had got the right result. Dinner eaten, we liked our little walk down to the shop in Dunboyne.
At that stage, we were all insulated in the team bubble. I didn’t mind who came at me. One night I was eating a Choc Ice and I came across a Dub: ‘Would ya look at da Gooch with da choc ice. He won’t be able to move tomorra.’ Everybody is different. I was lucky. The final, as an occasion, never got to me beforehand, but I know fellas it chewed up. The chances of that happening Sunday are slim, not because Dublin and Mayo are infallible, but because they both have huge depths of this big occasion stuff on board which will allow them play what’s inside the white lines.
This is where the top four or five counties can make experience count. The systems are tried and trusted, every manager circumvents potential problems like you would a ladder on the street. Don’t take the chance of going under it. Tickets can be a problem if you don’t delegate their distribution. I used just hand them onto my sister. One year I got someone two tickets and they wondered would I have two better ones instead?
That was the last of that.
Lights out, though, at 11.30pm on All-Ireland Saturday, whether it was Galvin, Darran, or Donaghy in the room with me. My first room-mate in 2002 was Ronan O’Connor from Foilmore and we were based in the Tara Towers Hotel. You wouldn’t get it now. Too central. But Paidi and his piseogs, Kerry had won the All-Ireland from there in 2000, so that was good enough. When you’re young, you’d sleep over Coppers for all the difference it made.
Paidi was a good man for keeping Kerry on message, or certainly the players on message. I had his arm around me more than any manager because I was 19. It was a short ride with him, but a thrilling one.
The time in his company, leaving aside the football is something I will not forget. His whole persona, his fun, his boldness, the roguery, that’s what I and a lot of the Kerry public loved. And he had the CV to back it up – eight All-Ireland medals, an U21 All-Ireland as manager, two more as the senior manager.
Tell me someone else who has it? Life is a natural progression towards less.
I won five All-Irelands but struggled the last year or two with different things. And I heard the whispers. They’re writing Bernard Brogan off now. Yesterday’s man.
Now that is loose talk.
